Beth, every point you raise confirms not just your normality but your taste, your wisdom and – if I may use this word in the Guardian – your class. Seriously, who wouldn't like a silk shift dress in blue, covered in little moons, and as that question is clearly rhetorical I shall save my energy and not bother typing a question mark. Then there's the fact that you feel – to use your medical description – "a little icky" about this. Beth, come here. To paraphrase those sages of the 90s, East 17, and their song Deep, rest your head against my chest.

But before we continue, I need to say something, so hush, now, you little Private Eye scamps, jumping up and down over there, and, yes, I'm talking to you, too, Ian Hislop. As I have said before in this paper, I wrote a book with Ms Beckham several years ago. Hey, I was young. It was a six-week job, we have not stayed in touch since and any praise I have for her designs does not come from Simon Fuller holding a gun to my temple, but because I genuinely like the clothes. Now let's get back to Beth's question.

Of course your love of those gorgeous clothes is mixed with a soupçon of self-hate. My God, the only thing that fills people with more dread than news of a celebrity "designing" a fashion range is an announcement that a model is fronting a hipster band. Mine eyes! Mine ears! Mine brain that is melting out of both!

Beth, not liking something simply because of who designed it is as daft as liking something for the same reason. Fashion magazines praise big-name designers every season, no matter how utterly cack the clothes are, because they are financially obliged to do so as these designers advertise in their pages. A more baffling phenomenon is when someone buys something – often something very expensive – because they think the designer is cool, a more common problem than you might think and epitomised by the It Bag phenomenon. It Bags are almost invariably ugly, expensive and completely unpractical, and I speak as one who bought a Chloé Paddington bag. It doesn't close properly, has a really annoying lining and is weighed down by a giant lock: I have less embarrassing ex-boyfriends. People – and I am not excusing myself here – buy these bags because they're told they're cool. The only reason anyone should buy a piece of fashion is because they like it, and the only reason they shouldn't buy something is because they don't like it (or because it's too expensive, but that's a separate issue.)

The designer is irrelevant. In fact, should you ever treat yourself to something from theoutnet.com or some other internet shopping site, instead of looking things up by designer, look them up by garments, ie dresses, skirts etc. That way, you'll see things that you wouldn't normally because you assume that you don't like that designer.

Prejudice has no place in fashion, Beth. Right on!

• Now, I do have to make a proper mea culpa. Not a Johann Hari-sized one, but I have culpa-ed. Last week, a gentleman called Guy East wrote to express astonishment at the number of people he saw buying Barbour jackets. I replied that this was part of the "faux posh" phenomenon. But being from the New World, I perhaps gauchely misunderstood the British class system. A gentleman called Simon Mills – who is not, he stresses, "a certain style journalist of that name" – has written in to right my wrong, like the butler Anthony Hopkins stepping in to assist his American boss, Christopher Reeve, in The Remains of the Day. Simon, over to you:

"I think you may have misplaced the emphasis in Guy East's letter. It isn't the act of wearing Barbours, but of purchasing them that is regarded as non-U in his family.

"I suspect Guy East of coming from a milieu where one inherits one's Barbour (as one inherits pretty well everything else). And if the family Barbour heirlooms have been ransacked by some wastrel cousin, I imagine one pays a gamekeeper or other member of staff to both purchase the new Barbour and wear it to an acceptable level of scruffy, leather patches et al.

"It's like Alan Clark's sneer about Heseltine needing to purchase his own furniture! A gentleman inherits. I hope that this is helpful."